Major Problems Facing Our Country Today - And Some Solutions
Published 12/23/08 Thomas Heffner
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Major Problems Facing Our Country:
- Reckless sale of strategic companies to foreign ownership
- Loss or decline of major industries - (Tv, Clothing, Steel, Publishing, Machine Tools, Automobiles, Electronics and others)
- Loss of good jobs
- Uncompetitiveness in manufacturing
- Wealth transfer to foreign ownership - 2.3 Billion Dollars a day through balance of Trade Deficit which equates to 1.6 Million per minute flowing to foreign countries. This money is used not to buy products but is used to buy us out as we now produce very little that foreign companies want.
- Difficulty for college students to find jobs for which they were trained as there are fewer American-owned companies for them to work for.
Here Are Some Solutions To Solve These
Problems And Propel Our Economy To New Heights
- Appoint an economic czar to develop policies that protect our economy from Foreign practices and to create conditions to make manufacturing competitive and profitable through government sponsored research, tax changes and subsidies. The following suggestions should be incorporated in our Policies:
- Develop an industrial research and development division (similar to government sponsored National Institute of Health (NIH) - in Medicine) or the Manhattan Project in World War II to focus on needs and development procedure for new and existing industries. Our country's future as we know it is at stake.
- Selective use of Tariffs for strategic and endangered industries to prevent their loss. This was done with great success many times in past years by Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan, and other Presidents.
- Change tax structure for select industries that we can't afford to lose - steel, etc.
- Consider changing agreement with the W.T.O. or get out of W.T.O. - it places unreasonable limitations on us
- Much better control of our Balance of Trade Deficit.
- Analyze every international trade deal - does it benefit the U.S.A?
- Curtail subsidies foreign owned companies receive from our State Governments
- Don't let any country do here that which they prevent from doing in their country and reciprocity in other areas.
- If countries don't honor in practice their agreements, we must change the arrangement or cancel.
- We should attempt to discourage technology transfer and outsourcing manufacturing if it causes us to lose industries.
- Prevent sale of strategic companies or institutions to foreign ownership
- Faster depreciation on capital equipment investment - it will lessen the need to outsource manufacturing.
- "Free" Trade has been a disaster - it must be replaced with intelligent "Trade"
Other Suggestions and Things To Consider:
- We must strive to become competitive otherwise we must exist on imports with more debt, accompanies with high unemployment.
- It must pay to manufacture or no company will do it.
- American owned companies have lost their edge and on balance are not as productive as many other foreign companies - We must learn to correct this with capital & knowledge intensive industries.
- We have lost a major economics war; we are relinquishing management and control of our economy through effects of our Balance of Trade Deficit, outsourcing, subsidized insourcing and foreign tax benefits.
- We must think of the consequences of losing whole industries such as publishing, steel, electronics, clothing and how it impacts national security and living standards.
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Article Comments From Readers
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biguru says "Light-years" on 12/24/08
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guest says "Response" on 12/23/08
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guest says "Uncompetitiveness in manufacturing" on 12/23/08
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That is so true. There has not been a process where this can be shortened. For example, every year millions of discarded cell phones show up at land fills. How about redesigning the cell phones such that in future, rather than discarding it, we can donate them to undeveloped countries or even schools, where they can be connected in a network to provide large computing power in a server farm - since cell phones have powerful computer chips and memory. I have this idea (I am sure many have the same idea), but we need someone in power to push all cell phone producers in this direction.
As to cheap labor, unless it is somewhat costly to the manufacturers, especially high value products, across the board - the owners/shareholders would not care to keep manufacturing base in the USA. So, certain items should be designated as national security interest. The items should be such that if we lose the supply line by ship, the society should continue without major distress or something like that.
I do not think the Japanese will outsource 90% of their manufacturing to China or Vietnam if cheap labor is the prime motivation.